In the following review, Hopkinson evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Strange Pilgrims.

“I saw him only once in Boccacio, the popular Barcelona club, a few hours before his miserable death.” It takes courage and confidence to open a story thus, and García Márquez clearly had an abundance of both, 20 years ago as now.

This volume of short stories [Strange Pilgrims] written mainly during his stays and travels in Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, provides the eternal outsider's view of the local, often displaced, residents. It has all the necessary García Márquez ingredients of violent death and magical imagination; physical and psychic suffering and conquest; characters of unaccountable spontaneity and inescapable habits, taken across any age and nationality with the same easy felicity.